Spreading some holiday cheer

If you haven't had a chance to watch this yet, chech out Romance of the Jedi.

It's been a while since I did a Christmas memory, so I thought that in honour of Jenny and Andrew's journey home tomorrow morning I would tell my most recent of favourite Christmas memories.

Around this time last year I got an idea. I thought that since I had friends with a vehicle, surely one of them could give me a ride home (or the general area there-abouts) for Christmas. But as it turned out the only one leaving any time around the date that I wanted to go home was Andrew, who lives all the way in Peterborough. On his way, however, he was going to go through Orillia. Ontario Northland runs a bus out of Orillia, to get to Hamilton it costs about $20. But the last bus of the night leaves at 8pm. We were supposed to leave Sudbury at around 11am, but for SOME reason Andrew's 1972 Comet was having trouble starting when it was -50 or so without the windchill. So after a day of he and Steph trying to get this car running we got out of town at exactly 5pm, giving us JUST enough time to get to Orillia.
This year had also been the first year that I had ever been able to watch Christmas specials with friends (most of my friends in high school thought I was a little odd... more so) and we had been reciting a lot of lines from these specials such as "This is man's work" (clop clop) and of course "Careful of the icy patch!". Sure enough driving down highway 69 we were not careful of the icy patch. In the old Comet full of luggage and presents, Nora on my lap, we hit an icy patch and spun out across the highway into a snow bank. The snow bank of course had a rock in it which the Comet got stuck on.
Fortunatly, no one (including Nora) was hurt but we were a little alarmed that we were stranded on the side of the highway about 45min north of Parry Sound (AKA the middle of nowhere). We quipped several times that if we were in a Christmas special surely Santa would have come by now to pull us to safety. We did however have a lot of help including several people that turned around to see if we were OK, and a tow-truck driver that got us out of there in less than 3 hours (as had been previously predicted). When we were retrieved from the snow and got to Parry Sound we read the McDonald's menus that had lists of "What to bring on a Winter roadtrip" including such useful items as "a first aid kit", "cell phone", "extra food", "warm clothes" and other useful things that we of course did not have.
A lot of things could have gone wrong on our adventure, and all and all we were pretty lucky. I managed to stay calm and collected in the car (miraculously) and Andrew brought me home with him to Peterborough, where I met the Root clan. (I believe the first thing his brother said to me was "so you actually choose to be friends with Andrew?").

Have a safe trip guys! And have a Merry Christmas!